Forbes columnist Steven Salzberg and author-investigator Joe Nickell will each be awarded the 2012 Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking, to be presented by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry at the CFI Summit in October.

Volume 57

May 1, 1999

“Doctored” CIA Letter Hailed As New Proof That MJ-12 Exists

“The hunt for a genuine U.S. Government document that shows the use of MJ-12 is over. The breakthrough comes from the FOIA [Freedom Of Information Act] effort of Tim Cooper,” according to a feature article in the March issue of the MUFON UFO Journal, authored by Dr. Robert Wood and his son Ryan. At a UFO conference last October in Connecticut, the Woods first reported and endorsed a batch of “new” MJ-12 documents obtained from Cooper—some of which had earlier been exposed as counterfeit by Stanton Friedman in his book “Top Secret/MAJIC” [SUN #55/Jan. 1999].

According to the Woods’ MUFON article, “This document, released by the CIA, is from the [Project] Paperclip files, Record Group 330, JIOA files, released Nov. 7, 1985. It is a memo from [CIA Director] Hillenkoetter on [dated] 12 April 1949 to the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) that, while otherwise unclassified, shows file distribution to a CIA Top Secret control file and to MJ-12. This is unambiguous evidence that there was such a project. To our knowledge, this is the first and only FOIA-released document designating MJ-12.” (Emphasis added.) In their MUFON article, the Woods also defend the authenticity of the three original MJ-12 documents, released in mid-1987 by William L. Moore, Jaime Shandera, and Friedman, as well as the more recent SOM 1-01 Special Operations Manual, some of whose counterfeiter “goofs” were exposed in SUN #55.

WHAT THE WOODS CLAIM TO BE “UNAMBIGUOUS EVIDENCE” THAT MJ-12 EXISTS

The “breakthrough” Hillenkoetter memo is reproduced in very small, difficult-to-read size in the MUFON article. The Woods—understandably—do not inform readers of its content or explain why a copy would be sent to MJ-12—if such a group existed. The Hillenkoetter memo of April 12, 1949, is in response to a JIOA memorandum written nearly a year earlier, on May 25, 1948. Considering the urgency of MJ-12’s (alleged) mission, and the fact that Hillenkoetter allegedly headed MJ-12, one should expect him to have responded much more promptly! The content of the memo is shown below:

“In connection with Paragraph I of reference [JIOA Memorandum No. 902 dated 25 May 1948], the Central Intelligence Agency does not believe that any further action by CINCEUR [Commander in Chief, Europe] will be necessary. Pertinent information from reference and its attachments has been given to the Bureau of Mines, Department of Interior, and to the National Bureau of Standards, Department of Commerce for their information, and Central Intelligence Agency has asked to be advised of action or information obtained by those agencies as a result.” (Emphasis added.)

If the JIOA memorandum of May 25, 1948, discussed crashed saucers and other Top Secret MJ-12 matters, why would the Bureau of Mines have a “need-to-know” for such sensitive information? So far as is known, neither Cooper nor the Woods have ever obtained a copy of the JIOA memo to which the Hillenkoetter memo refers.

This 1949 Hillenkoetter memo is believed by SUN to be an authentic document which has been “doctored” by a counterfeiter who added “FILE DIST:/CIA Top Secret/MJ-12” at the lower left. The left-hand margin of this segment is slightly smaller than the margin of the rest of the memo, which indicates that it was added after the original memo was typed.

Meet Tim Cooper, Who Provided The “New MJ-12 Documents”

Tim Cooper, who supplied the Woods with more than a dozen of the “new MJ-12 documents,” including the recent Hillenkoetter 1949 memo, has a long-standing interest in claims of crashed saucers and government coverup. Cooper claims he received the “new” MJ-12 documents from a Thomas Cantwheel and that the MJ-12 papers were found in his Post Office box (in Big Bear Lake, Calif.) without any envelopes. Earlier, Cooper was a major source of crashed-saucer tales for Leonard H. Stringfield, a pioneer researcher in that field who first reported on his findings at the 1978 MUFON conference.

Stringfield’s updated Status Report #6, published in July 1991, included several crashed-saucer tales provided by Cooper, who claimed they came from anonymous former military personnel who seemingly allowed him to tape record the interview, judging from verbatim transcripts which Cooper provided. In one of these interviews, which allegedly occurred on Feb. 10, 1991, Cooper reported asking his unidentified source: “Did you know of the IPU (Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit)?” SUN had never before heard the term “Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit,” nor since reading Stringfield’s report, until we saw one of Cooper’s MJ-12 documents which was titled: “INTERPLANETARY PHENOMENON UNIT SUMMARY.”

MORE “CURIOUS COINCIDENCE” LINKS

There are more “curious coincidence” similarities that link information which Cooper previously supplied to Stringfield and the contents of the “MJ-12 documents” which Cooper later provided to the Woods. For example, according to one of Cooper’s (alleged) sources the U.S. government consulted with the Vatican and Cardinal Francis Spellman about the possible implications for the Catholic church if ET visits were made public. One of the Cooper provided documents purports to be the “First Annual Report” of the “Majestic Twelve Project.” It contains the following: “At the request of Panel member [sic], Cardinal Francis Spellman met with the President to discuss the containment within the Catholic Church and its heirchy [sic] of religious speculation if mass [UFO] sightings occur.” (Emphasis added.)

According to the Cooper-provided document, one member of the 15-person MJ-12 panel was the chief chaplain of the Army, Maj. Gen. Luther D. Miller. He would seem an unlikely choice considering the MJ-12 panel’s stated objective: “To investigate the capture of unidentified planform (sic) space vehicles by U.S. Armed Forces and Agencies.” But the inclusion of the Army’s chief chaplain would seem to confirm Cooper’s earlier claim to Stringfield that President Truman was concerned about the effect of public knowledge of ET visits on traditional religions.

Another Cooper-supplied MJ-12 document, dated 19 Sept. 1947 and purportedly written by Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining, provides another suspicious link to Stringfield’s 1991 report. This (alleged) Twining report cites a crashed-saucer recovered in Missouri in 1941—more than six years before the Roswell incident. The Twining report states: “Based on all available evidence collected from [1947] recovered exhibits currently under study...[they] are deemed extraterrestrial in nature. This conclusion was reached as a result of comparisons of artifacts from the Missouri discovery in 1941.” Two pages later the Twining report again mentions “the recovery case of 1941.” Stringfield’s 1991 report (a copy of which he provided to Cooper) contains an account by a Texas woman of her grandfather’s tale that a strange craft had crashed near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in the spring of 1941 and three small, “not-human” bodies had been recovered. MJ-12 REPORT OF 1952 CITES “UFO MYTH” OF 1960s-1970s AS FACT

Alhough the Cooper-supplied “First Annual Report” by MJ-12 carries no date, it contains references which indicate it was prepared in the fall of 1952—roughly five years after MJ-12 (allegedly) was created. The report cites a few authentic UFO sightings by military aircraft which would be readily available to a counterfeiter. But it also cites spurious incidents which did not emerge into “UFO mythology” until the 1960s and 1970s. For example, the (alleged) MJ-12’s “First Annual Report” describes the incident involving five Navy TBM-3 torpedo bombers that “disappeared” during a training flight from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Dec. 5, 1945. The Cooper-supplied document claims, “It is believed that Flight 19 encountered a phenomenon of a celestial nature. The last known radio transmission from the instructor pilot was heard by a ham operator, ‘Don't come after me...they look like they're from outer space....The Naval Board of Inquiry said, ‘we were not able to make even a good guess as to what happened.'” (Emphasis added.) In reality, no such radio message was ever reported during the lengthy Navy Board of Inquiry investigation. (During the late 1960s, SUN’s editor spent several days in the Navy archives reviewing the lengthy transcript of the investigation.)

The first mention of the alleged radio message—“they look like they are from outer space”— did not occur until the late 1960s—more than a decade after the MJ-12 report (allegedly) was written—when several articles and books were published which promoted the “Bermuda/Devil’s Triangle.” Contrary to the Cooper-supplied MJ-12 report claim that the Navy Board of Inquiry was “not able to make even a good guess as to what happened,” the Board concluded: “The disappearance was caused by temporary mental confusion resulting from faulty judgement on the part of the flight leader and instructor of Flight 19, Lt. Charles C. Taylor, in permitting himself to lose knowledge of his general position relative to the peninsula of Florida...” (The last radio messages indicated that the five aircraft were running out of fuel and would try to “ditch” [land] in darkness on stormy seas.)

OTHER RIDICULOUS CLAIMS IN COOPER/WOODS’ MJ-12 DOCUMENTS

The “First Annual Report of MJ-12” includes many ridiculous claims and statements. For example:

“It is believed that the debris discovered on 2 July 1947 [actually June 14] by a local rancher [Brazel] was the result of a mid-air collision with an X-plane from HAFB [Hollomon AF Base], another unidentified object, or possibly collided with both.” (Emphasis added.) [SUN Comment: Although the incident occurred five years earlier, MJ-12 seemingly had not been able to determine if one of our own experimental (X-

plane) aircraft was missing or was involved.]

“From 1949 to late 1950s, there have been several crashes of B-36 bombers on routine artic (sic) patrol that bear all the earmarks of the [Capt. Thomas] Mantell incident. None of the crews were found. The atomic bombs were not recovered, thus creating a serious problem for the Air Force when nuclear weapons are lost over friendly countries.” (Emphasis added.] [SUN Comment: Ridiculous claim. There is no evidence that even a single, giant B-36 carrying atomic bombs ever crashed in the Arctic and was never found.

WAS THE SAME TYPEWRITER USED TO CREATE DIFFERENT MJ-12 DOCUMENTS?

When typewriters are not cleaned/serviced periodically, “crud” from their ribbons accumulates in the circular portions of their typeface—typically the smaller, lower-case letters. By a “curious coincidence,” some of the Cooper-supplied MJ-12 documents—which if authentic would have been typed in geographically separated offices using different typewriters— seemingly were typed using the same machine, judging from the “crud” that fills the circular portion of same letters. For example, in both The First Annual MJ-12 Report (1952) and the 1947 Twining report “crud” fills the circular portions of the same lower-case letters: “p” “e” “d” and “o.” And in both the Einstein/Oppenheimer report and the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Field Order of July 4, 1947, the circular portion of the lower-case “p” is filled with “crud.”

Cooper’s Sworn Statement Denies He Created “New” MJ-12 Documents

In a two-page notarized statement dated March 8, 1999, Tim Cooper says that he “is not, and never has been, a document hoaxer, forger, or fabricator.” Further, the notarized statement says that Cooper “did not, with immoral intentions or pretext solicit, suggest, manipulate or encourage DR. ROBERT M. WOOD and RYAN S. WOOD, to make public the existence of the alleged Majestic documents through the electronic, radio, and print media for the purpose of monetary gain, profit, or extortion.” (Emphasis added.)

In a second two-page notarized statement of March 8, Cooper states that “he did not create or fabricate the person known to him as THOMAS CANTWHEEL [who reportedly provided the MJ-12 documents to Cooper]. That he did not create or fabricate a meeting with the person known as THOMAS CANTWHEEL that occurred on the night of July 16, 1995, at his place of employment known as Pine Knot Landing located at 439 Pine Knot Blvd., Big Bear Lake, CA 92315. That he did not hoax, forge, and fabricate any letters allegedly written by THOMAS CANTWHEEL and a person described as SALINA....That he and others have performed and are now performing due diligence to locate, identify, and bring forward the person AKA THOMAS CANTWHEEL or establish his true identity and credentials. That he can provide correspondence in the form of letters from other individuals chronicling THOMAS CANTWHEEL and the alleged Majestic documents.” (Emphasis added.)

Cooper’s second notarized statement concludes with the following: “That he is willing to submit to vetting and polygraph examination to establish his character and truthfulness in matters pertaining to allegations that he is a hoaxer, forger and fabricator of documents and signatures. And, that he is prepared to appear in court, if need be, to proclaim his innocence regarding unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations that he is behind the whole Majestic hoax and wishes to face his accusers face-to-face under penalty of perjury.” (Emphasis added.)

What Maj. Marcel Really Said In Gen. Ramey’s Office On July 8, 1947

Although Maj. Jesse Marcel played a key role in the “Roswell incident,” essentially every statement attributed to him in most books and articles is based on his 30+ year-old recollections when he was interviewed in the late 1970s by UFOlogists such as Stanton Friedman and Bob Pratt, then a reporter for the National Enquirer. Fortuitously, Pratt tape recorded his interview with Marcel, and its transcript was published in Karl Pflock’s “Roswell In Per-spective” (RIP) report. “The Roswell Incident,” co-authored by William L. Moore and Charles Berlitz, contains direct quotes attributed to Marcel, but Moore has never released a complete transcript of the interview(s) with Marcel.

Thanks to J. Bond Johnson, the then-young reporter from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram who visited Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey’s office on July 8, 1947, and took pictures of Marcel, Ramey and Col. DuBose as well as debris Marcel brought to Fort Worth, it is possible to learn key facts about the Roswell incident in Marcel’s own words, based on his then-fresh recollections. Johnson recently provided SUN with a copy of the longer article which appeared in the later edition of the Star-Telegram on July 9. It included more direct quotations of statements made by Marcel in Ramey’s office than the early edition story in SUN’s files. Major portions of the later/longer edition article are reproduced below.

THE FT. WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM’s JULY 9, 1947, LATER-EDITION STORY:

“A New Mexico rancher’s discovery which for several hours Tuesday rocked the disc-conscious nation was identified at Fort Worth Army Air Field Tuesday night as a weather balloon-kite, exploding a rumor that a flying disk finally had been captured. The contraption, of tinfoil, narrow

wooden beams and synthetic rubber that once had been an Army Air Forces Rawin-machine used to determine direction and velocity of winds at high altitudes, was flown to FWAAF from Roswell, N.M. Army Air Field by B-29 Tuesday morning.

“Here, Brig. Gen. Roger M. Ramey, commanding officer of the 8th Air Force, and Col. Thomas J. Dubose (sic), his chief of staff, both identified the discovery as a ‘weather device’ used by the AAF. Warrant Officer Irving Newton of Medford, Miss., a forecaster at the FWAAF weather station, positively listed the object as a ray wind (sic) target. When rigged up, Newton stated, the device is six-pointed and looks very much like a star. He said it was silvery in appearance as a result of tinfoil and rose in the air like a kite, mounted to a 100-gram balloon. ‘We use them because they can go so much higher than the eye can see,’ Newton explained. A radar set is employed to follow the device, which gives off radar impressions [i.e., reflects radar energy] through the tinfoil, he added. Through a process of triangulation the winds aloft are then charted....

“The remains of the weather device were flown here at the command of General Ramey, after their discovery by W.W. Brazell (sic) on his ranch....Brazell, whose ranch is 30 miles from the nearest telephone and has no radio, knew nothing about flying disks when he found the remains of the weather device scattered over a square mile of his property three weeks ago [i.e., mid-June]. He bundled together the large pile of tinfoil and broken wooden beams about one-fourth of an inch thick and a half-inch wide and torn mass of synthetic rubber that had been the balloon and rolled it under some brush, according to Maj. Jesse A. Marcel of Houma, La., 509th Bomb Group intelligence officer at Roswell, who brought the device to FWAAF. On a trip to town Saturday night to Corona, N.M., Brazell heard the first reference to the ‘silver flying disks,’ Major Marcel related at General Ramey’s headquarters here. (Emphasis added.)

‘Brazell then hurried home, and bright and early Sunday, dug up the remnants of the kite and balloon,’ Marcel continued, ‘and on Monday headed for Roswell to report his find to the sheriff.’ [Many Roswell incident books claim Brazel came to Roswell on Sunday.] This resulted in a call to Roswell Army Air Field by the sheriff and to Marcel’s being assigned the case. Marcel and Brazell then journeyed back to the ranch, where the major took the discovery into the custody of the Army. ‘The ranch is out in the middle of nowhere,’ Marcel declared, ‘and we spent a couple of hours Monday afternoon looking for any more parts of the weather device. We found a few more patches of tinfoil and rubber.’ (Emphasis added.)

“Marcel brought back the discovery to Roswell Army Air Field early Tuesday morning, and at 8 a.m. reported to his commanding officer, Col. William H. Blanchard, 509th Bomb Group chief. Blanchard, in turn, reported to General Ramey, who ordered the find flown to Fort Worth immediately. About that time, word broke from Roswell that a flying disk finally had been found. [Lt. Walter Haut distributed his press release around noon.] In a matter of minutes, wire services across the nation were screaming the news of the discovery and the airwaves were full of the story. As soon as the ‘disk’ was brought into General Ramey’s office, he and Colonel Dubose tabbed it as a weather device. The weather officer on duty at the time, Warrant Officer Newton, merely made the identification positive. Previously, General Ramey in a phone conversation with the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, Ohio, had been ordered to fly the ‘disk’ there immediately for observation. When it was positively identified as a Rawin machine, the flight to Wright Field was cancelled.” (Emphasis added.)

Brazel’s July 8 Account Confirms Marcel’s July 8 Account; Both Corroborated By Photos Of Debris In Ramey’s Office

Maj. Marcel’s account, given in Forth Worth during the late afternoon of July 8, and the photos taken by J. Bond Johnson in Ramey’s office, closely match the description given several hours later by rancher Brazel in the offices of the Roswell Daily Record, as reported in that newspaper’s July 9 edition. Highlight portions of that article are quoted below:

“...Brazel related that on June 14 he and an 8-year-old son, Vernon, were about 7 or 8 miles from the ranch house of the J.B. Foster ranch, which he operates, when they came upon a large area of bright wreckage made up on (sic) rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks. At the time Brazel was in a hurry to get his round made and he did not pay much attention to it. But he did remark about what he had seen and on July 4 he, his wife, Vernon and a daughter Betty, age 14, went back to the spot and gathered up quite a bit of the debris. The next day he first heard about the flying disks, and he wondered if what he had found might be the remnants of one of these. (Emphasis added.)

“Monday [July 7] he came to town [Roswell] to sell some wool and while here he went to see sheriff George Wilcox and ‘whispered kinda confidential like’ that he might have found a flying disk. Wilcox got in touch with the Roswell Army Air Field and Maj Jesse A. Marcel and a man in plain clothes accompanied him home, where they picked up the rest of the pieces of the ‘disk’ and went to his home to try to reconstruct it. According to Brazel they simply could not reconstruct it at all....Then Major Marcel brought it to Roswell... (Emphasis added.)

“Brazel said he did not see it fall from the sky and did not see it before it was torn up, so he did not know the size or shape it might have been, but he thought it might have been about as large as a table top. The balloon which held it up, if that was how it worked, must have been about 12 feet long, he felt....The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards in diameter. When the debris was gathered up the tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks made a bundle about three feet long and 7 or 8 inches thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches long and about 8 inches thick. In all, he estimated, the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds. (Emphasis added.)

“There was no sign of any metal in the area which might have been used for an engine and no sign of any propellers of any kind although at least one paper fin had been glued onto some of the tinfoil. There were no words to be found anywhere on the instrument although there were letters on some of the parts. Considerable scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed on it had been used in the construction. No strings or wire were to be found but there were some eyelets in the paper to indicate that some sort of attachments may have been used.” (Emphasis added.)

Ridiculous Explanations Offered To Counter Brazel’s Statements

Those who promote the crashed-saucer/government-coverup theory resort to a variety of explanations for the corroborative statements made by rancher Brazel in Roswell and Maj. Marcel in Fort Worth, and the debris photos taken in Ramey’s office. One explanation offered is that Brazel was bribed or threatened to support the balloon-borne radar-target explanation given by Gen. Ramey. But Brazel failed to confirm Ramey’s explanation, as reported in the closing portion of the July 9 article in the Roswell Daily Record: “Brazel said that he had previously found two weather observation balloons on the ranch, but that what he found this time did not in any way resemble either of these. ‘I am sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon,’ he said.” [In 1947, ordinary weather balloons did not carry radar-targets.]

Another claim, that Brazel was held “incommunicado” for several days at the Roswell Army Air Field to prevent him from talking to the media, is shown to be false by the Roswell Daily Record article. It reports that “Brazel was brought here [to the Daily Record offices] late yesterday by W. E. Whitmore of radio station KGFL, had his picture taken and gave an interview to the Record and Jason Kellahin, sent here from the Albuquerque bureau of the Associated Press to cover the story.” Brazel then returned with Whitmore to his home where he was an overnight guest, according to Whitmore’s son. Prior to Whitmore bringing Brazel to the newspaper, he had been interviewed using a wire-recorder for a later radio station broadcast. Because of these several interviews and because the news media lost interest in the story after Ramey’s explanation, there would have been no possible reason to hold Brazel “incommunicado.”

Recent Effort To “Decipher” Message On Paper Held By Gen. Ramey

Some UFOlogists who believe the government recovered a crashed ET craft in New Mexico are trying to “decipher” a faintly visible, out-of-focus message on a piece of paper being held by Gen. Ramey in photos taken in his office on July 8, 1947. The USAF made a similar effort during its 1994 Roswell investigation using the expertise and technology of the CIA’s National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC). Although NPIC’s advanced technology enables it to read auto-license-plate numbers on photos taken by 200-mile-high satellites, it was unable to read enough letters to reliably reconstruct the message on Ramey’s sheet of paper.

The new effort to read the message using the latest commercial PC image-enhancement software was launched last summer by a group of UFOlogists in the U.S., England and Russia, which calls itself “Roswell Photo Interpretation Team” (RPIT). The effort is headed by California pro-UFOlogist Ron Regehr. Another independent researcher, Dr. Donald R. Burleson, a computer specialist at Eastern New Mexico University in Roswell who says he has spent hundreds of hours trying to “read” the message, illustrated the difficulties in a letter published in the Jan. 1999 issue of the MUFON UFO Journal. Whereas one RPIT analyst inter-preted a critical letter to be an “A,” Burleson concluded it might really be an “M.” Whereas RPIT interpreted one numeral to be an “8,” Burleson is certain it is really a “4.” In a subsequent letter in the March issue of the MUFON UFO Journal, Burleson reports that what he previously thought to be “MAJ??” might be “WAJ?K” or “WRECK.” Despite many such uncertainties, Burleson predicts: “We are on the threshold of announcing that the cover-up is over.”

“UFO Messiah” Firmage Plans 20-City Lecture Tour

Joe Firmage, the brilliant, 28-year-old multi-millionaire software expert who believes he has discovered a link between UFOs, Biblical miracles and esoteric scientific hypotheses, plans a 20-city lecture tour to promote his new book “The Truth” [SUN #56/Mar. 1999]. Firmage will privately fund the printing of 100,000 hardcover copies of “The Truth,” earlier made available on the Internet, “so he'll have total editorial control,” according to a feature article in the Mar. 31 edition of The Washington Post, written by Joel Achenbach. During this summer’s tour, according to Achenbach, Firmage “won’t do ordinary book signings

but will speak, he vows, in auditoriums and other large venues. He’s thinking big all the way.”

The Feb. 19 edition of USA TODAY newspaper, with nationwide readership, carried a full-page advertisement, sponsored by Firmage’s International Space Sciences Organization, promoting UFOs and “The Truth.” The ad, which reportedly cost $81,250, featured out-of-context statements by Presidents Truman, Carter and Reagan and UFO-promoters such as Lt. Col. Philip Corso [SUN #49/Jan. 1998]. Firmage’s ad offered the following quote from Gen. Twining’s letter of Sept. 23, 1947: “The phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious.” The same Twining letter, written more than two months after the Roswell incident, stated: “Due consideration must be given to the following: The lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered exhibits which would undeniably prove the existence of these objects.” FIRMAGE DID NOT INCLUDE THIS PART OF TWINING’s LETTER IN HIS AD.

Also quoted was Hillenkoetter who was identified as the CIA’s first director: “Unknown objects are operating under intelligent control....It is imperative that we learn where UFOs come from and what their purpose is.” This 1960 statement was made after he had retired from the Navy and had joined the Board of Directors of NICAP—then the nation’s largest pro-UFO group. But three years later, on Sept. 19, 1963, after he had resigned from NICAP’s Board and had read the new book by famous astronomer and UFO-skeptic Dr. Donald Menzel, Hillenkoetter wrote Menzel and said: “...you have effectively put to rest all surmises about flying saucers being from ‘outer space.’ You have done a thorough and praiseworthy job.”

SHORT SHRIFT

“UFO Messiah” Joe Firmage to speak at MUFON conference: A recent addition to the impressive list of pro-UFO speakers who are scheduled to appear at MUFON’s 1999 conference July 2-4 in Alexandria, Va., is Joe Firmage. SUN, which plans to attend, will be interested to hear the reactions to Firmage’s views by more traditional leaders of the UFO Movement, such as Budd Hopkins, Dr. Bruce Maccabee, Eddie Bullard, Richard Hall and Stanton Friedman—who are also scheduled speakers. The reaction of the audience also will be of interest in assessing whether Firmage is likely to emerge as a new leader in the UFO Movement.

Will Friedman comment on “new” MJ-12 documents at MUFON conference? Stanton Friedman, a staunch supporter of the reality of MJ-12, has been publicly silent in commenting on Dr. Robert Wood’s endorsement of the “new” MJ-12 documents provided by Tim Cooper. In Friedman’s book “Top Secret/MAJIC,” he reported that his own investigation of some of Cooper’s MJ-12 paper documents indicated they were counterfeit [SUN #55/Jan. 1999]. However, Friedman and Wood have been close friends for many years. Friedman’s comments will reveal whether he believes “candor” is more important than “friendship.”

Long-time UFOlogist Richard Hall is skeptical about “new” MJ-12 documents: In Hall’s commentary in the April issue of the MUFON UFO Journal, he said he applauded the Woods for what he called “their conscientious effort to determine the authenticity of the [new] MJ-12 documents [but] I am bothered that they have stated their conclusions...before allowing time for adequate peer review.” Hall added: “Having seen the skeptical objections by some very knowledgable people, I am on record as being highly skeptical of all the MJ-12 documents.” (Emphasis added.)

NBC-TV’s UFO special attracted 11 million viewers: “Confirmation: Hard Evidence of Aliens Among Us?” the two-hour NBC-TV special broadcast on Feb. 17, attracted slightly more than 11 million viewers, according to the Nielsen audience assessment, putting the show in second place for that time-slot that night. Nielsen projects that the first half hour attracted 11.0 million viewers, which increased to 11.9 million for the second half hour. The audience then dropped slightly during the last hour, which was largely devoted to “UFO abductions.”

Watch out for an asteroid named “Klass”: Asteroid 7277, which was discovered on Sept. 4, 1983, has been named “Klass,” in honor of SUN’s editor, by the Minor Planet Center Committee. Asteroid Klass has a diameter of about 7 miles and a period of 4.24 years. The honor was recommended by James McGaha, a Tucson, Az., astronomer who is also a skeptical UFO investigator.

Back copies of SUN available at bargain price: If you'd like to supplement your collection of Skeptics UFO Newsletters by obtaining older issues, a limited supply is available for $1 per copy, i.e., $6 per year. Please specify year of interest or subject.

NOTE: Opinions expressed in SUN are those of its editor—unless otherwise noted—and do NOT necessarily represent the views of any organization with which he is affiliated. We thank DR. GARY POSNER for his help in proofreading.

Philip J. Klass

Phil Klass was a UFO researcher with a background in electrical engineering. He was author of seven books on UFOs, including UFOs Explained and UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game. He was also editor of the SUN newsletter, a UFO-related publication.

Content copyright CSI or the respective copyright holders. Do not redistribute without obtaining permission. Thanks to the ESO for the image of the Helix Nebula, also NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team for the image of NGC 3808B (ARP 87).